At Work in the Forests of the Lord b y T om W olf
foresters tend to be members of CFF. And every one of these, whether mature tree or sapling, traces his/her roots back to one man: Denny Lynch. I visited with Denny Lynch recently. We met under the canopy of autumn leaves at his place near Fort Collins, where he and his wife, Joyce, live surrounded by trees—and by the success of their efforts to foster a Christian environmental ethic among natural resource professionals working in institutions like the US Forest Service. As I drove to this meeting, passing through the great public land forests of Colorado, I marveled at how many at work in the “forests of the Lord” are also at work in CFF. As a Roman Catholic, my own tastes run to incense and incantations, and I don’t find much appeal in CFF’s style of Christianity. But I do deeply admire the work of Denny Lynch, whose role as a model Christian forester speaks for itself through CFF. My long drive from my home in southwestern Colorado gave me time to reflect. I recalled how two job offers had come my way when I finished my PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. One was from Notre Dame,
Imagine an international “organization” that is nondenominational and decentralized, composed of self-replicating cells. This headless cabal has units in many forested areas of many nations. It seeks to spread a certain word based on a sacred scripture like the Koran. It has a strange logo full of arcane symbols. Its meetings tend to occur at odd hours and in remote locations far from the centers of power. Is this a shadowy terrorist band like Al Qaeda? Are we talking about missionaries? Is this some weird sect out of The Da Vinci Code? Strange as it may seem, this group’s avowed goal is to maintain forests as places of refuge and meditation for the persecuted and oppressed. Its highly trained members vow to serve mankind as good forest stewards. They want to create working forests that supply the needs of people with wood products, clean water, abundant wildlife, and forage. They are the Christian Foresters Fellowship. Christian Foresters Fellowship (CFF) tries to bridge the gap between professional ethics and personal conviction. I was skeptical that this could be done, but after 30 years in the environmental field, I find that the best and the brightest among
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into fierce opposition from environmentalists.Without understanding the first thing about forest science, I found myself telling my students, “Clear-cutting forests is morally wrong. You really ought to go out and change the world.” And my colleague said to me, “The way to change the world is to change the Forest Service.They think that science guides them. And they think that environmentalism is not science but an ersatz religion.They’ll never learn your language and culture from the humanities—and especially not from the Bible.You will have to learn their language of forest science. It’s you who belong back in the woods.” He had a point. As a Catholic, I was used to highly centralized, quasi-military institutions. Further, my father had worked for the US Bureau of Reclamation as a designer of dams, so I understood life in large federal bureaucracies. Maybe it was I who was out of place at tiny Walden Pond. This forested slope became so slippery that I soon found myself writing to various forestry schools about their graduate programs. I knew from growing up in Colorado that Colorado State University was a Forest Service “factory school.” The most interesting reply came from Professor Denny Lynch at CSU. In response to my questions, he said he didn’t see that science and religion had to be at odds in forestry matters. It seemed as if he somehow understood my longing to get back to the woods of the American West. He shared my passion for teaching, but he also shared this with me: “Of all who plant and tend, only the man of God and the for-
and the other was from Brandeis University.As a cradle Catholic and former college football player, my heart leapt at the thought of Notre Dame. But I chose Brandeis, because it was America’s premier Jewish university and because my most admired professors had been Jews. And then there was the proximity to Henry David Thoreau’s country. I had grown up amidst the great national forests of Colorado. Now here were a few acres of woods that might serve me as a holy grove: the Rome of American environmentalism. As the token Roman Catholic in an all-Jewish setting, I found myself teaching Bible-based literature courses where students gained their first exposure to the Gospels and especially to St. Paul. Mostly I taught Protestant poets like Milton and Wordsworth. But there were also courses like “Bob Dylan and the Prophetic Tradition” and “Bruce Springsteen and the Christian Tradition.” As time went by, I taught classes in “Environmental Ethics and the Judeo-Christian Tradition.” The students were a young teacher’s dream, but they had one blind spot: Walden Pond. It was not sacred to them. Every class made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, and every class came away bewildered by my fascination with the site’s trees.The more we read the Bible as literature, the more I saw both forests and trees. And the more I saw of both, the more I wanted to learn about trees. A colleague and I founded an environmental studies program. He was writing a book about the US Forest Service, focusing on the language and culture of that institution as its practice of clear-cutting forests ran
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Denny and Joyce Lynch founded Christian Foresters Fellowship in 1973 with an eye to foster a Christian environmental ethic among natural resource professionals. ester dedicate their lives to a certain faith in an everlasting harvest to be enjoyed in some future time by others.” That sense of a forested infinity became my introduction to CFF—and to a professional and environmental ethic that is profoundly Bible-based. At its inception in the 1970s, CFF was really just a weekly campus prayer breakfast. Today, CFF expresses its goals this way: • To equip foresters and natural resource managers to share Christ effectively with fellow professionals, to disciple new believers effectively to know Christ and make him known, and to serve mankind as good stewards of God’s forests. • To maintain forests as places of refuge and meditation for the persecuted and oppressed until Jesus comes again. • To create working forests that supply the needs of people with wood products, clean water, abundant wildlife, and forage to the glory of God. CFF is not shy. Its members are committed to the development of Christian character in the lives of natural resource professionals. “We believe that professional excellence and confidence are the results of a transformed Christian life,” Lynch says. At CSU, where I studied with Denny Lynch, I soon noticed that forestry professionals from local agencies joined the CFF meetings. I finished my graduate degree in forestry and went on to a career based on a goal I share with wilderness pioneer Arthur Carhart: imagining a better Forest Service. Meanwhile, every Thursday morning from 1973 until 1997, the CFF breakfast began with prayer, singing, a devotional brought by a member of the group or an invited speaker. In addition, there were one-on-one discipleship training times for men, women, and couples; evening Bible studies; prayer times; pizza parties; graduation dinners; and retreats to the mountains for hiking or ski-touring. Upon Lynch’s retirement as an active professor at CSU in 1997, the weekly breakfasts ended. However, former students and professionals adopted the idea, and CFF branched out to other areas for Bible studies and prayer times with fellow employees. Other university groups were started by faculty in other states. Some former graduate students and visiting faculty started similar groups in places as far away as Korea. Professional forestry organizations, particularly in the South, have consistently held meetings for Christian foresters at state and regional meetings. Each year a CFF breakfast or lunch is held at the National Convention of the Society of American Foresters (SAF). Not everyone was as happy with the relationship between SAF and CFF as I was. If the whole point, so to speak, of CFF was to imagine a better forestry profession, then some SAF members were having none of it. Ron Lanner is a forest scientist who took exception.Twenty years after the original controversy, I contacted Dr. Lanner, who told me: “I still feel
as I did earlier—that SAF’s unifying principle is using science to advance forestry and that introducing religious splintering can only hurt the organization. Religion may have its place, but it should not seek the appearance of being sanctioned by SAF. Being listed on an SAF convention program is my idea of inappropriate influence.” As I sat in the autumn sun with Denny and Joyce Lynch, we remembered many old friends, and they reflected over their commitment to CFF. Now retired, they seemed to savor the chance to look back over those decades of nurturing people —and trees. Lynch told me, “The key was to keep our natural resource focus—keep our focus on forests as refuges. God created Adam in a forested place.Trees were important to Adam and to Eve and to God. Adam was supposed to steward all this. Not to eat of the fruit of two trees, but to care for all trees. Therefore, trees are deeply rooted in human nature. All peoples have an affinity for forests. All people incline to want to take care of trees.This affinity includes appreciation for forest beauty and caring for forests.” He added that obviously people are sinful and do wrong to forests. “But this is because they do not see beyond the temple to the Creator. A forest is a place for spirituality. In your life, there should not be two tracks but one: Professionalism shows who you are spiritually.” As the afternoon sun warmed us, Denny and Joyce agreed, “God commanded us to care for and keep our forests.The key themes are keeping vs. using.To keep means to conserve and to preserve. The original sin is an environmental sin.” n Learn more about Christian Foresters Fellowship at ChristianForesters.org. Tom Wolf works for the Mancos Conservation District in southwestern Colorado, where he is writing a watershed-wide forest-andriver restoration plan in cooperation with the US Forest Service and Mesa Verde National Park. He worked for many years for The Nature Conservancy and other environmental organizations. His latest book is Arthur Carhart:Wilderness Prophet (University Press of Colorado, 2008).
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